Monday, January 26, 2009

Sharks Bahamas-Waiting on a Prop Jet

The story of last Novembers shark expedition to the Bahamas can now be told.

As you know Shark Diver does commercial shark diving adventures. As well as being strong industry advocates, we also work with an exclusive client list who own some of the top yachts worldwide. We have been working with this select group since 2003.

In November I got a call to create a one day Tiger shark expedition to the Bahamas...oh, and could we have the entire team assembled, cages in place, and two crew members at the airstrip in Freeport in one week?

Naturally the answer was "yes". In a flash I had Luke Tipple our Dive Operations Manager and Richard Theiss on the phone and in 72 hours we had approved the yacht, pulled our benthic cage system out of storage in Florida, and started to Fed Ex full face mask communications gear (Ocean Reef) to our vessel.

The client was going to use a 120' charter yacht, fly in for one day, hit Tiger Beach and jet out again by nightfall. It's a tall order, but if the weather gods align just right and you know what you are doing, this site delivers.

Two round trip tickets to Miami from L.A for the crew (Richard dropped another project for us and agreed to shoot for the client), a few last minute deliveries of gear and voila, there was our Shark Diver Crew at the airport at 6.00am waiting for a private prop jet to arrive with the client.

That's when things...went south. Not everything in the shark world works out perfectly, and best laid plans, including moving a complete vessel assist shark diving service 300 miles down the coast and over 3000lbs of gear, sometimes don't work.

Our crew sat on the tarmac from 6.00am to 7.00 to 8.00 and then a call to Luke Tipple and myself, "The client reports they had an accident last night in Miami and will not be able to make it".

Right about now you start running the numbers for what this expedition cost and you start to feel very bad for the client. After all we're here to show people sharks not sit on the tarmac in Freeport. So, in the end, our boys enjoyed a round trip cruise aboard a very nice yacht from Miami to Freeport and back, got to take in the airport scenery, and spent the next 10 hours on the way back dumping many hundreds of pounds of dead and rotting fish off the stern (chum).